on practice Archives

Peace is right here, right now

November 14, 2018Bodhipaksa

For the past month I’ve been recording a series of daily guided meditations, taking as my basis the teachings in a Buddhist discourse called the Honeyball Sutta. This teaching (also sometimes called the “Honeycake Sutta” outlines a feedback loop whereby we end up causing ourselves suffering.

It describes how the basic situation is that consciousness, through sense organs, perceives objects (which can be internal, like thoughts, or external, like the words you’re reading now). This is called “contact.” The word “contact” contains the assumption that there is a self “contacting” a world that is separate from it. The Buddha is not saying this is how things actually are — just that that’s how …

Debunking seven myths about the Buddha

October 25, 2018Bodhipaksa

Some of the misconceptions about the Buddha are so common that you’ll find them in just about every book on Buddhism. The problem is that most of these books are merely rehashes of other books on Buddhism, so that misconceptions get passed on for decades and even centuries.

So here I’d like to debunk some myths about the Buddha. I’m not talking about myths like “The Buddha was a god” (he was a historical human figure) or that the Buddha was fat (that’s an entirely different figure, Budai, who was a Chinese monk). I’m going to debunk things that even many savvy Buddhists believe to be true because they’ve read them so often.

So here …

Your happiness does not depend on how you feel

October 15, 2018Bodhipaksa

Recently I’ve been feeling, on and off, kind of crappy. A lot of the time I’m fine, but then heavy, despondent feelings arrive. Mostly this is to do with chronically “scraping by” financially, and the extra stress that causes: having to calculate how little gas I can get away with putting in the car, trying to juggle spending less in the supermarket with eating a diet that will keep me healthy, and so on.

I’m not complaining: at least I have a car, and I’m not going to go hungry. I often count my blessings. And mostly I’m optimistic and that keeps me going. But in the long term it gets a bit wearing.

When …

A “feeling crap” meditation

September 20, 2018Bodhipaksa

I’m sure that sometimes you feel crap.

The other week I was feeling particularly crappy. I have an idea what was causing me to feel that way, but that’s not particularly important. The thing is that I was feeling crap, by which I mean I felt sad, tired, and sometimes despairing.

The last thing I wanted to do, really, was to sit in meditation and experience how crap I was feeling. But I know from past experience that that’s the most helpful thing I can do. And so I sat on my meditation bench so that I could find a better way to relate to feeling crap.

I settled in to meditate, I noticed the …

Deceptive Facebook pages and weaponized mindfulness

September 4, 2018Bodhipaksa

As we should all know by now, Russian intelligence services have been attempting to manipulate opinion in Western democracies. The simplistic version of the story, as it applies to the US, is that, as Vladimir Putin publicly stated, the Kremlin wanted Donald Trump to win. But the more accurate version of the story — the bigger picture — is that it’s to Russia’s advantage to have the United States divided and distracted. (The same applies to Europe, which is why Russia supported the Brexit movement.)

Russian interference took many forms. It wasn’t just pro-Trump, and they actually played both sides, having pages devoted, for example, to promoting “Black Lives Matter” as well as “Blue Lives …

Tune your brain for happiness and effectiveness

September 3, 2018Bodhipaksa

A huge amount of research over the last few years has given us a better idea of what happens in the brain when we meditate, and how meditation brings us long term benefits. Meditation, for example:

Helps to slow down aging of the brain
Increases thickness in parts of the brain to do with memory and learning
Reduces mind-wandering and unhappiness
Increases the thickness of parts of the brain connected with emotional regulation
Improves concentration
Reduces our susceptibility to anxiety and depression
Helps us tolerate pain
Reduces feelings of isolation

It may seem rather staggering that one activity can lead to such a varied range of benefits. It is clear in fact that meditation has …

Five ways to forgive yourself and let go of painful regret

August 21, 2018Bodhipaksa

I’ve seen many people suffering because they can’t forgive themselves. Maybe they hurt someone in the past, or allowed someone to get hurt, or missed an opportunity, or made a bad choice. And they torture themselves about it.

Sometimes people hold onto these regrets—and the pain they cause—for years or decades, and have great difficulty letting go of them. And regret festers. It’s like a wound that never heals, and that, like an abscess, poisons our entire being. It can turn into self-hatred—the belief that we, in our very core, are bad or unworthy.

Now there’s no way to instantly forgive ourselves. It’s a process that can take years. But I’d like to suggest a …

Four steps to self-empathy and self-kindness

August 8, 2018Bodhipaksa

One thing that’s changed my life more than any other is the practice of self-empathy. Simply hearing the term for the first time was a revelation for me, since I immediately recognized that I wasn’t in fact empathetic toward myself. It had never even occurred to me to have empathy for myself. And this was despite the fact that I’d been, at that point, practicing lovingkindness meditation for more than two decades.

My lack of self-empathy showed itself in the way I could be down on myself when I was struggling. I took being unhappy as a sign of failure, as if I was meant to be happy all the time. At one point my …

Four things to remember when online discussions get heated

July 19, 2018Bodhipaksa

While Buddhism teaches that all beings have the potential for awakening, and that we should endeavor to relate with kindness and compassion to everyone, I admit that this is especially difficult for me on social media.

We live in particularly challenging times. Society is becoming more polarized and tribal, and I’m shocked to see a resurgence of racism and of desire for authoritarian rule, for example. Those things really stir me up emotionally when I see them online.

I’d like to offer just a few suggestions that I’ve found helpful when dealing with people I disagree with online. None of this is rocket science, and I’m not presenting myself as an expert. This is all …

You are the universe become conscious of itself

July 6, 2018Bodhipaksa

My favorite meditation practice from the Buddhist tradition is also one of the least well-known. It’s a reflection on the interconnected nature of our being, and it’s called the Six Element Practice.

It’s my favorite for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s deeply poetic, evoking our nature as intrinsically part of the universe. For another, it aligns closely with contemporary science, which is a subject I love, and which gives the practice added richness. Lastly, it’s very effective: I and many people I’ve taught this meditation practice to have found that it radically changes our sense of who we are. It gives us a sense of connectedness, of lightness of being, and of …